Latency/Ping grows with the number of players?
hit321
Join Date: 2007-11-17 Member: 62942Members, Constellation, NS2 Map Tester
Join Date: 2007-11-17 Member: 62942Members, Constellation, NS2 Map Tester
<div class="IPBDescription">On NS2</div>Subject: Will my latency/ping increase when increase the number of spectators on the server?
Last night when I was playing the NSL, I had a doubt about the latency on NS2 when I saw 4~7 spectators.
The ping will not increase if increase too the number of players on the server? And if are only spectators increasing, will be some difference?
I don't know much about the netcode of NS2, but in the most games the number of players will increase the latency for everybody. It's more packet of data for sharing with server, right? Even for spectators recieve the positions/infos about the players, when have more spectators these informations will be send for more people, so, my latency/ping will be modify according more people will receive my information/position. The server will need more "data" for spread and deal with it...or not?
For me, even if is only a spectator, it will receive and get my packets and use more time from server about me. And this will increase if have more spectatoros or players.
Some players tell me it's me that ping the server, not server ping me. But it's as if only I were sending information for the server.
I know that ping and latency are a little different, and my issue is more about latency.
I hope you understand my question, and I know that is Game Engine Question that needs a knowledge of ns2's code.
Last night when I was playing the NSL, I had a doubt about the latency on NS2 when I saw 4~7 spectators.
The ping will not increase if increase too the number of players on the server? And if are only spectators increasing, will be some difference?
I don't know much about the netcode of NS2, but in the most games the number of players will increase the latency for everybody. It's more packet of data for sharing with server, right? Even for spectators recieve the positions/infos about the players, when have more spectators these informations will be send for more people, so, my latency/ping will be modify according more people will receive my information/position. The server will need more "data" for spread and deal with it...or not?
For me, even if is only a spectator, it will receive and get my packets and use more time from server about me. And this will increase if have more spectatoros or players.
Some players tell me it's me that ping the server, not server ping me. But it's as if only I were sending information for the server.
I know that ping and latency are a little different, and my issue is more about latency.
I hope you understand my question, and I know that is Game Engine Question that needs a knowledge of ns2's code.
Comments
- More players
- More entities on the map (i.e. longer matches/later in a game)
Server performance decreases slightly with every added player logged on, although a player interacting with the game is MUCH more expensive for the server than a player simply downloading game state data. If server performance decreases enough, the game will certainly feel laggy for all the players involved. However, your latency cannot be changed by this. Latency is a very low level function of the internet backbone. A slow computer cannot make more latency.
There are EXTREMELY rare fringe cases where the internet might choose to route data over a longer route if there are too many connections passing through one node... however, these are usually only encountered when talking about thousands of user connections in extra traffic. Not "7".
This is only for round-trip data though, so the latency from you sending your data to the server should be unaffected. You just might see the result later varying by server performance. Naturally, a server that doesn't have a solid tickrate of 30 per second isn't that good to play on anyways.
This is only for round-trip data though, so the latency from you sending your data to the server should be unaffected. You just might see the result later varying by server performance. Naturally, a server that doesn't have a solid tickrate of 30 per second isn't that good to play on anyways.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Latency will generally update more frequently than the servers tick rate (NS2 could be doing this wrong, but it should not be). It's usually handled by the network card itself, not the CPU. The whole point of interpolation is to get around the limitations of tickrate, it would be silly if there were no clocking measures at a finer grain than tickrate.
So, you said "in general ". But, from a guy, only a guy, where is in another country, far away from the server and from the other players into it, when increase the number of Spectators, this guy will have, at least, a decrease on performance and an increase of latency.
I realy need to know this, because I have a team and we need to know 'HOW' and 'HOW MUCH' playing in a faraway Server will harm us.
So thank you all for the answers and the ideas about it.